In a new paper in the journal Rural Sociology, Andrew Flachs, an environmental anthropologist at Purdue University identifies several hot spots where this movement is really taking shape: the West Coast, central Texas and Oklahoma, central Florida, and the Great Lakes region.

“We’re seeing these hot spots pop up in the peripheries of hip cities,” Flachs says. “Some of these places might seem obvious, like the West Coast and the northern Midwest around Madison, the Twin Cities, and Chicago. But we also see some things that aren’t totally expected.”

Among the unexpected trends he found, east Texas and the southern Midwest are becoming increasingly important for this kind of agriculture. Appalachia, which has historically been a hub, essentially disappeared from the map.In collaboration with Matthew Abel, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Flachs built a model that counts how many traits associated with new American agrarianism appear in each county. With data from the USDA agricultural censuses from 1997 to 2012, they considered factors such as average sales per farm, number of certified organic farms, owners under age 34, number of farms selling directly to individuals, proximity to farmers markets, and more.

SuperMeat, an Israeli biotech and food-tech startup that is developing lab-made chicken meat, has raised $3 million in seed funding, as it becomes the latest of a crop of so-called "clean meat" companies to get off the ground. Others in the space include Bill Gates, Atomico and DFJ-backed Memphis Meats, and Hampton Creek, which is also exploring lab-grown meat.
SuperMeat CEO and co-founder Ido Savir, who has been an ethical vegan for the past 20 years, says that PHW’s investment is proof that the food industry is ready to embrace new technology, specifically in enabling food production to further scale and in a more sustainable way.
That’s the longterm, though not yet realized, promise of "clean meat," which is produced in a lab by growing real animal cells. In SuperMeat’s case, those extracted from a chicken. Put over simply, the process involves feeding the cells the correct nutrients to produce muscle and fat, as would ordinarily happen were they grown inside an animal’s body.
If lab-made meat could replace the need to rear (and slaughter) animals, it would be hugely beneficial in reducing the environmental impact that industrial farming has, as well as reducing the spread of food-borne illnesses.
Read the full article about the lab-made meat startup SuperMeat by Steve O'Hear at TechCrunch.

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